December 30, 2015

Narendra Modi’s Foreign Travel Not to Blame

The following article originally appeared in Mint on December 30, 2015. An excerpt is below, and the full text can be accessed here.

It has become a common refrain among critics on social
media and in the country’s newspaper opinion pages that Modi spends far too
much time outside the country while neglecting his domestic responsibilities.
Even the Financial Times recently decided to pile on, reporting that
investors were tired of Modi “spending too much time abroad while the domestic
economy is allowed to drift”. To some extent, the perception is an outcome of
the high-visibility diaspora events in which the prime minister participates on
his foreign travels—from Madison Square Garden to Wembley Stadium—as well as
his penchant for showmanship, whether attempting archery in Mongolia or
dropping in for the birthday of Nawaz Sharif, his Pakistani counterpart.

But the line of criticism that the prime minister’s
foreign jaunts are somehow responsible for his domestic shortcomings is
misplaced. For one thing, Modi’s travel has not been particularly inordinate by
the standards of his counterparts in other countries—or even his predecessor.
In 2015, he visited 25 countries and spent a total of 53 days travelling
abroad. By comparison, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe—like Modi, a
relatively young leader believed to have brought diplomatic vigour to his
office—visited 23 countries, including Jamaica, Ukraine and Jordan, and spent
58 days on tour. China’s President Xi Jinping was no slouch either, managing
visits to 14 countries over 42 days this year, including some as far afield as
Zimbabwe and Belarus. To draw another comparison, during the first year of his
second term as prime minister, Modi’s predecessor Manmohan Singh travelled for
47 days to 12 countries. Basically, Modi’s busy travel schedule in 2015—which still
kept him at home roughly 85% of the time—is no longer particularly out of the
ordinary for the leader of a major state.

At the same time, visits abroad by a national leader are
not what they once were. The increased ease of air travel has made foreign
touring not only more regular but generally more mundane and less
time-consuming. When Jawaharlal Nehru first visited the US as prime minister in
1949, he spent three weeks touring the country, according to historian
Ramachandra Guha, “delivering a speech a day” including to “a crowd of 10,000
at the University of California at Berkeley.” Not every foreign visit by an
Indian prime minister now carries the same novelty value, and not every trip
can be considered particularly memorable or historic. But neither do individual
visits involve the lengthy commitments of time and effort that they once did.

Critics also forget that it is possible now to govern
while on the road. Cabinet colleagues and senior bureaucrats are just a phone
call away. Major decisions can be made in Air India One or in hotel suites just
as easily as in Race Course Road or in South Block. In an era of globe-trotting
business travellers and live media reports via satellite feeds, the notion that
good governance requires being chained to one’s desk seems terribly outdated.